Strip (32 page)

“Please don't talk.”

“I thought it would be like that. Just like that, from the first time I saw you. When I saw you in Quebec. When you opened the door to your place. I bet you didn't know that.”

“Mother warned me about men like you.” Maybe she had. I tried to laugh. “I love you, too. I think I love you the way you love me—I wanted to tell you when I got back from down south but I didn't want to cramp your style. I was afraid you'd be scared off, not know what I meant. I was so anxious to see you.”

“It all comes out now.”

“Someday we can go there together. Down south. When you're better.”

“When I'm better.”

We sat there for a long moment holding hands while the rush of the rest of the hospital passed by the door. I leaned in close. “Hey, don't get excited now, but I love it when you you-know-what me. Wait. That sounds bad. I mean it feels great physically, but what I mean is that to have you in me is…”

“You mean,
fuck
you?”

“
Sodomize
please, we are in a hospital.”

“You're killing me. Sodomy's for churches, anal intercourse is for hospitals.”

“Feeling whole. I feel whole. You know.” He looked so peaceful when I said that. His faced relaxed as if I'd said the magic words. “Oh, something else…
ddt
wants me.”

“You really are trying to kill me.”

“That means I can't say
cock
anymore, at all, ever again. It's always
penis
from here on in.”

“I knew you could do it. I… knew… it.”

“Don't talk. Once you're better we'll celebrate. Tomorrow?” We had talked so much about the past, our shared past and our private ones. It was now time to talk about the future. “We can make plans.”

He squeezed my hand hard. I hoped that he knew I had broken the curse. I could go back into the world of the artists and creators. Things could only get better. “Look, I brought you Nelligan. I'll read to you tomorrow.”

 

In the morning I
woke, my head in his lap, my neck stiff, and the nurses had already gotten to work around us. It took me a long, incomprehensible moment to realize I had been wrong. Things could always get worse; Kent had died sometime in the night and I cursed myself for having said I hated goodbyes. Even with the life gone out of him, he looked so peaceful, as if the ravages of the years were held at bay for a few more moments. The nurses said it was some kind of new pneumonia that they couldn't control. He had likely suffocated or something. I wanted to hate myself at that moment for letting the universe see how much joy there had been in my life for those few moments the night before—too much. That morning I sat—curtains pulled around the bed—with his body for hours, and wept, and dried my eyes and wept and wept and wept, until the nurses told me they needed the bed. They had called his family and he'd be kept in the morgue until they arrived. I left, and something about the clear sky said that there would be nothing, nothing at all to give me comfort. I sat in Queen's Park while traffic whirled, uptown and downtown, around me, and I cried. I cried so much that I felt as if my ribs would collapse. I hoped that from somewhere he could see me. I hoped he was there on the park bench with me. I wanted to believe anything and everything. I thought that crying about Daniel had been the ultimate broken heart and the depths of emotional despair, but I had been wrong. This pain was the kind that you curse the universe for; it's the kind you say you had never agreed to as part of your life.

From Queen's Park there was nowhere to go. My day was spent looking for places, small spaces next to dumpsters or vacant lobbies where I could crouch, pretend I was tying my shoe, and then cry. I had never cried that way, where the breath is gone, and the sobs shake your back. I had lost my frame of reference, my anchor and my reason for being. Not much made sense. I phoned Rachelle, tried between sobs to tell her what had happened.

“I wondered why you weren't at class this morning. I really missed you.” But she couldn't say much about a man I said I loved, whom she had never met.

I called Kent's family when I got home and they told me they didn't want a service. Nothing. As though they were suffering more from embarrassment than from grief. Were they afraid his friends might show up at a funeral?

I called Ruth, and after the silence she came across as so much more together than what I was trying to be. She more or less took over. She wanted the parents' phone number. “Don't worry,” she said, sniffing and blowing her nose into the phone. “I've done this before. There will be a funeral even if it's over my dead body.”

The family had gone ahead and made their arrangements and that day everything that was Kent, including his bed—our bed—was taken by a relative with a truck. I stayed in my room and nursed a killer headache. When they were gone, I was left with that book he had shown me, of his friends, and the frying pan I never washed. I never did.

That night Rachelle came over and we lit a candle for Kent and then she smoked some of a joint I had found on the mantle while I drank a six-pack. Rachelle was quiet for a while and then she started to cry, too, mourning her own separation. “I never met him,” she sniffed. “He must have been a great guy. I admit, I was a bit jealous.”

“I thought we'd have a laugh. You would have liked him. He would have liked you. I wanted you to meet.”

ddt
seemed like a far-off victory by then. I made an effort that weekend to tell myself that our dream was finally coming true, and that anything I did for myself was for our dreams.

On Sunday, the rain uncovered piles of black snow, but I rode the streetcar out to the Beaches anyway. I needed to get out of the empty space that was no longer us. I needed to walk and walk. The tears flowed silently as I looked out the window. My nose was getting raw from wiping it, and when I got to the beach I let go and blubbered like a baby, since no one could hear me.

Monday morning I phoned
ddt
, told the woman who answered that it was “the new kid in the company,” and asked what time company class started. The secretary told me 10:30. When I arrived, the artistic director and the secretary met me at the door. They were there to welcome me, no doubt. So this was what my new life would be like. Something of the ease and the respect of being a true professional again. I told them briefly and quickly about Kent, that later in the week I needed to go to the funeral, when I knew the details. It would be close by, I assured them. It was a bitter sweetness, and sad as I was, I wanted to believe he was right there, close by, cheering me on.

The three of us stood in the cold for several minutes, them only in shirts, and I was wondering why we weren't going in. The director started to say something about a misunderstanding while the secretary looked at me with a forced sympathetic wrinkled brow. The director said I had referred to myself as the new kid in the company but that they merely wanted me to start taking class in their junior school. Once they had broken through my delusional cloud, I was overwhelmed with the feeling they were hiding something. Politics perhaps? I remembered our conversation quite well, and there was nothing about signing a contract to take dance class; that audition had been on the lips of every dancer within a hundred-mile radius of downtown Toronto, and it wasn't to take class in the junior school. The proof was right there in the newspapers.

Can we talk politics? Can we talk competition? Nepotism? Who went down on whom over the weekend to turn my world on its head? Was it my indiscretion at the birthday party? I was baffled and speechless. There I was, back on Parliament Street on a Monday morning without a job. My fortunes were almost laughable.

I walked along Wellesley as the traffic shunted by, until I got to that coffee shop where we had felt so comfortable.

I had to find a reason to continue.

 

There is a moment
during a funeral, and if you aren't too caught up on your own grief you will see it—the mother, shamed in life by her gay son, approaches the altar and takes up the picture of him his friends have placed there. She holds the picture, looks at it, wonders if she ever really knew him, wonders if she ever let herself know him. Wonders if she knew him too well and denied it, to herself and others. She realizes in a split second that there really was nothing more keeping them at a distance than her own ignorance. You'll see a tear run down her cheek when she realizes her grave mistake.

 

Ruth had organized something
between a shindig and a spectacle; the small church was packed, and Kent's family was there in the front row where Ruth had parked them. She wanted his parents to see just how loved he had been. There were dancers, actors, models and a ton of good-looking men. There were a few looking gaunt, leaning on canes or being pushed in wheelchairs. Everyone seemed to be starting to wilt, like late summer flowers. All had been so vital and full of intense colour, then waking up in the morning and finding that the frost had gotten them. What was this thing?

Ruth came and shoved herself in beside me. “Why are funerals always such short notice? They don't give you much time for planning.” We had to chuckle. “Did you see the parents? They're right up there.” She was buzzing. “Wait until the grand finale.” The speeches filled in all the things I didn't know about Kent but all of the things I suspected. He was so loved, and such a gentle being. No wonder he loved that album with all of his friends. I could never see myself living such a selfless life. Would I ever know any of these people?

And, as promised, at the end of the service that included tributes, poems, readings and reminiscences, one of Toronto's most famous jazz singers, a beautiful, big black woman, sang, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from the balcony above and behind us. I held Ruth until my head was on her chest and I was weeping like a baby. After, everyone gathered in an extremely tasteful old apartment, again in the depths of Cabbagetown, but no one seemed to want to face their sorrow about Kent. I left early. It wasn't how I wanted to remember him. The only mourning I do now is in moments like this, when there is no shoulder to cry on.

 

 

Ten

A dancer's step is
light but definite, on the ball of the foot, toes gripping the earth. A dancer moves through the music, on or off the beat, a waltz, a two-step, broken into counts of eight or triplets. The steps carry them somewhere upstage, downstage; they fly and launch into a
tour jeté
, a split
jeté
, a
saut de basque
, or any number of trajectories through the air that leave steps far behind—that leave others earthbound.

 

How did I get
here, to this place where I am wondering if I will be dressed like Nero fiddling as Rome burns, in my bedsheet toga, on the subway on the way home?

 

With Kent dead and
my contract at
ddt
mysteriously gone, I wondered how I would pay my next month's rent—like I did when I left the Company, like I did when I arrived in Quebec City, like I did the first time I stepped off the bus in Winnipeg, like I did the first and every subsequent time I was fired from every job I'd ever had because I'd eaten ice cream out of the tub in the cooler, or eaten off some customer's plate, or stuffed a whole slice of carrot cake in my mouth (as the boss appeared in the kitchen) in order to support this nasty habit called dance, that demanded the furnace be stoked constantly.

I thought it was dumb luck to get that call yesterday. No, it wasn't another audition or a contract. There was some male bedroom-voice who was a friend of a friend of someone at that party where I had stripped, who wanted a private showing. I slept on the idea. I tried to call on my departed Kent for guidance, but I think we ended up having an argument, and then a kind of esoteric sex. I'm not sure, perhaps he understood. Perhaps he was just plain gone. Wine finally helped make the decision. I didn't get teary or maudlin as I had in the past when I drank during a depressed state. Wine kept me from it all. Thankfully I slept. Tears only came in the early morning as I stumbled to the bathroom and remembered where I was, who I was and who was gone.

 

A few hours ago
I hauled my crap to a rendezvous at the corner of Yonge and Bloor. Once again I felt like Kent was likely somewhere nearby shaking his finger at me and telling me I was better than this. He felt so close.

And there it was, a Corvette parked up on the sidewalk. The client, Harrison Ford's long-lost twin brother, was already stoned but he smoked another joint with me at his side, and then he revved the engine, spun off the sidewalk and tore down Yonge Street doing at least ninety through a bunch of red lights. We raced out to the Beaches on the Lake Shore and his weed had got me blathering. I was happy. I was going to have a bit of cash to get me by. I had also never smoked this much and it brought a kind of peace within, for a moment. Then I started imagining I was in an adventure flick with Indiana Jones. We stopped at Johnny K's and ordered sundaes. Everything became snapshots, no memory was joined to any other. I saw that Rachelle was there with a friend, and all I can remember is her big face saying,
Are you okay? Are you stoned? Call me tomorrow.
I just giggled back. I squinted, and even though I felt like I was all mouth, I couldn't taste the sundae I'd ordered.

The next snapshot was us as we sped up Mount Pleasant to those prison-like, whitewashed high-rises on Davisville. How the hell was I going to strip with a sundae in my stomach and a big stupid smile on my face? Maybe someone could lend me sunglasses. Maybe someone could hold me up, too.

He told me I was going to strip there, for him and no one else. I had my ghetto blaster and the sleaze I was wearing, the jeans with buttons, my tux shirt—basically whatever you find at the bottom of these stairs. I knew where this was all going. He wasn't going to take me in his arms and hold me while I cried buckets over Kent and found comfort in this guy's big, hairy chest. I could never share that with anyone.

It was a nice place. Nothing I was used to; nothing from a garage sale or the consignment store. It was all black leather chairs and white walls. Minimal. I put my tape in his wall-mounted Bang and Olufsen instead of my shitty boom box and, surprise! It was cued to play “Gloria.”

I started moving, and he sat back in his black leather recliner, with nothing on but his white Fruit of the Loom hiding the lost ark.

 

Shit, would you look
at this, everything here at the bottom of the stairs. It's all travelled in a neat clump, it must be my lucky day.

Look at my hand. There should be a pinkie ring if he didn't go through my pockets. Here we go. I got this when I was twelve. Eaton's in downtown Edmonton. For Christmas. It's been refitted a few times. In Quebec when I realized I could use it in my act, I called on a jeweller around the corner from Sainte-Ursule, near that church. It's a great little time-waster.

This is how it started, upstairs. Same as always: I lick my finger to lubricate it, and then I press my finger into and out of my mouth in slow motion like it's a you-know-what, going into and out of some part of someone. I try not to rush. It's the slow motion that is going to get his juices going.

I got into the slow part, like always, my hips revolving, slowly, but they never stop. Maybe figure eights, just to keep them moving to the beat. That's innocent enough. By now my fingers are in my mouth and my ring is slipping off my finger and between my teeth. I didn't hand it to this guy. I just stuck it in my pocket.

My watch, too. I played with my watch a little, undid it like I was trying to unbind my wrists. Hands up here. And my wrists in front. They're a little thick at this angle. And my forearms were tight against my cuffs. All these master-slave innuendoes trigger those pheromones, leaving the skin prickly.

The watch was off. The strap was in my mouth. I licked it like it was a tongue meeting my tongue. Then I held it out so he could get a better look at it. Right near my crotch. Like some guy gently stroking himself.

I dropped it in my pocket.

It worked with cufflinks, too. There is that suggestion of bondage again and then I break free, like this, to show the backs of my wrists. I don't roll my cuffs up right away. I let things like cuffs just hang for a while. Carelessly. A watchband near the crotch, an undone cuff. Lips that are loose and glistening. The pout. The help-me-I-don't-know-what's-become-of-me pout. The I'm-too-stoned-to-care pout. The save-me pout.

At this point, in private, I would have asked him to hold the cufflinks. But up there, in the penthouse, I stuck them in my pocket.

It's funny I could go on and on about executing the perfect plié or a
tendu
, or the incredible focus to take you through a pirouette, or what it is you have to believe in order to play Tybalt or Romeo. But they would just be words. You can never be part of that dance, not like you can be part of this one.

So I did the ring, the fingers, the watch and the wrists. Here's the tie. I'd wear a long tie for a businessman theme; men get hot for the straight businessman look, or the bowtie like this one, for the classic tux that makes women drool. A jacket would have been the first thing out of the way, but I didn't wear a jacket today. I loosened the tie to show that the temperature was rising inside my shirt and then I just pulled it away and tossed it, and got down to business.

I undid these buttons. Here. At the top of my shirt. Worked my way down, still with the cuffs loose. The buttons on the shirt and on the crotch of jeans are about the best way to draw out a tease to someone. It's the Pandora's box that contains all of your
x
-rated dreams. By the time I reach the buttons, people have given in to their desires. They have crossed over the line and will go with whatever happens.

Tell me if I asked for it.

I just undid the buttons like this, one by one. Slowly. Until they were all undone and there were…

No.

More.

Until the shirt is open, and he got a glimpse of my nipples, my pecs, my abs. It might not look like much in this light but I can tell you with good lighting anyone can look amazing.

Imagine the fabric as it falls open here. See my nipple touching the edge. I wait for that. I know when an audience can see it, because I can feel it. My nipples are small, tight and hard. They don't have the plummy, soft texture of some you see. No, but they are nipples and they have feelings and they will respond if touched, and best of all they get erect in a situation like this one. I open the shirt. Reveal my front. The firm sight of it bared and vulnerable. My chest is nothing spectacular. I've shaped it. It looks a little beat up now. But it has depth, thanks to swimming. It has a heart, thanks to…

Yes, those are moles across it.

Don't touch it. Not now. Not yet. That's what I said up there.

Don't worry, I didn't touch him. I promise, it never came to that.

I took off the shirt and made sure he got a good view of my back, my lats, my traps, the wideness, the I'm-going-to-protect-you-ness of it. I flexed because from behind it suggests that I'm doing something crude and secretive.

So it's the back first and then the full-on front, which is what he waited for and, by God, I better give him that, all of it.

But he wasn't patient.

And I held my arms back, before the shirt came off—it's easier to flex my chest and biceps with the sleeves pulling at me from behind. And then my shirt was off and my hands were where he wanted my hands to be, on my chest rubbing myself down that line of hair, below my navel. Then my hands dug into my waist to grab this belt. Remember, I kept the hips moving, grinding,
really
grinding. Closer to the floor because that's where I was going to end up.

The belt first, it got a lot of time. I pulled on the belt to get it undone. Like I was pulling on my penis, my dick, my cock. I pulled until it pulled me off my heels. Like this. Then I whipped it out from the hoops, fast. And presto, just like when I was a kid and dried my crotch and ass with a towel, in and out, pretending I was the Lone Ranger, rocking back and forth, then side to side over my cheeks with my back to my audience. Sassy. I folded the belt and slapped my ass like heigh-ho Silver, like I did in that little cowboy outfit. And if he was into ass, which he must have been, he got a thrill, didn't he? That belt is a good part of the act.

Pretend you're holding the belt.

And then it was my pants. These ones here, so much nicer when on.

The buttons on Levi's are God's gift to strippers, otherwise a zipper will do for more formal occasions. (If it's a zipper, I pull back in the hips and pretend there is pain in my crotch because a sudden erection has crippled me and made it almost impossible to get my fly undone.) With my pelvis still retracted, I got my greedy, needy hands in there. Then I shoved the hips forward like a blatant invitation.

He showed such restraint in that chair.

I definitely had to get my hips forward as far as possible. You know. Shoved forward as if I couldn't help but have something fall out, flail wildly, and oops, I'd forgotten that there was a
g
-string and some clean underwear to go along with it. I shoved my pants to the floor and stepped out of them.

“Here,” I said. “Hold my jeans.”

Then I ran my hands up and down the inside of my thighs with my legs open. Crotch to knee. Knees to crotch. Crotch to knee. Like so. I like that sensation too, to be honest. It got to him.

He wouldn't let on if he was enjoying it, though. And neither did I.

So there, in my
g
-string, it was time to give him the angle shots: the hips twisted to the right and the torso square toward him so it looks like I have a twelve-inch waist and massive shoulders. Smoke and mirrors. A universal turn-on.

Sorry, I'm straying. But look in any porn or fitness magazine. You either have the broad shoulder shot or a crotch shot in your face. Let me continue.

Nine times out of ten, I get onto the floor on my knees, legs spread and go for the juice. Lots of rubbing now. I limbo onto my back. The socks come off for the foot fetishists in the crowd. (I have to please as many people as I can.) It's a good idea to have well-tended toes, not filthy black soles. My feet are okay and good with cream on them the night before. Sure, let them see your soles, too. That's a big turn-on for at least sixteen percent of your house, although they won't admit it.

I went for the
g
-string, and though it left enough to the imagination, with the cock ring on and the equipment on the swollen side, I didn't want to give too much away too soon. Besides I'm pretty quick about pulling at both sides and then playing with the clips until, flick, flick, flick, it's off like magic. He was going to have to see me this way anyway. I could have been just a piece of meat to him, couldn't I?

Speaking of meat, I've definitely got nothing to complain about. It's cut. Liars translate seven to nine, but honestly they rarely get bigger than this. Nice girth. When I was a kid, I thought there was something wrong with the way it stood diagonally at attention. I thought horizontal was perfect.

If all you want is to see the guy's cock while he's up there, there it is, a spiralling hose, a stumpy mushroom or a thick sausage trying to free itself of the foreskin. Some are so big they are veined, to carry the supply of blood the length of the member. Some men faint when it's erect. When flaccid, it might recoil into a warm crotch, creating the forward bulge. On hot days it swings in shorts and track pants, the sensitive head rubbing against the fabric. It gets stroked in the shower or at the urinal, shaken lightly or tugged by a lingering hand, tickled by fingertips while someone watches. It provides both fascination and joy, this taboo tool changing shape every minute of the day as it's jostled, squeezed, tossed, grabbed, sniffed, sucked and shoved, or just thought about. The dick can be a daisy chain that connects generations. It's a source of amusement, and occasional annoyance. It can be a best friend or a dangerous weapon, depending which end of it you are connected to.